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A curator builds context. An artist builds the work. But neither means much without someone choosing to live with the result. This week we turn to the collector's side of digital art — not as a market function, but as its own way of looking at the world.

This is Part 3 of our Digital Art in Four Perspectives series. Part 1 looked at curatorial practice through Alice Scope; Part 2 looked at an artist's practice through Auriea Harvey. This week: the collector's perspective, through a conversation with Bharat Krymo.

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Meet Bharat Krymo

Bharat Krymo is an angel investor with a diverse portfolio, including 6529 Holdings, who has been involved in crypto since 2013. He didn't arrive at digital art collecting by tracking a market — he arrived through relationships, drawn in by the quality of the people the space attracted long before "digital art collector" was a familiar identity to hold.

More than a decade later, that orientation hasn't changed. Krymo has been a consistent voice for collecting that prioritizes connection and conviction over trends, and his longevity — through multiple boom-and-bust cycles — gives that perspective unusual weight. Most accounts of digital art collecting come from people who arrived in 2020 or 2021, at the peak of hype. Krymo entered earlier, stayed through the corrections, and kept going.

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What Actually Motivates a Collector

Ask what makes someone a collector rather than a buyer, and Krymo's answer runs through curiosity and conviction rather than acquisition. A few ideas from his conversation with 100 collectors get at what that looks like in practice:

Person-to-person connection as the foundation. What drew Krymo into crypto in 2013 wasn't the financial opportunity — it was the directness and intellectual seriousness of the people it attracted. That same orientation toward human connection has shaped his collecting practice ever since, in ways a purely market-driven approach doesn't produce.

Collecting and investing as parallel, not identical, practices. Angel investing and art collecting both mean backing people and ideas before they're proven — reading character, evaluating conviction, deciding under uncertainty. Krymo brings an investor's discipline to collecting while resisting an investor's detachment.

Ecosystem thinking, not just object acquisition. Krymo's involvement with 6529 Holdings reflects a commitment to the infrastructure and culture around digital art, not only the individual works. That wider view — supporting the systems that let the space function — is rarer among collectors than it should be.

Longevity as its own form of knowledge. Having navigated the space since 2013, Krymo has a clear sense of what survives a cycle: which collecting commitments still feel meaningful when prices aren't rising. That's a different kind of expertise than reading a floor price.

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Collecting as a Way of Looking, Not Just Acquiring

The throughline of Krymo's perspective is that collecting isn't primarily a transaction — it's a discipline. It's about developing a way of looking, choosing which artists to support, and building a collection that reflects your own interests and values rather than the consensus of the moment. Seen through his eyes, digital art isn't defined only by the work or its context, but by the relationships and conviction a collector brings to it over time.

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Listen to the Full Conversation

This article draws from Unlocked, the podcast by 100 collectors — conversations with the artists, curators, collectors, and builders shaping the digital art world, with no market speculation and no hype.

🎧 Listen to the full episode with Bharat Krymo

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Go Deeper: Interview with Chris Dorland

To continue this week's conversation, we're pairing the episode with our interview with Chris Dorland, conducted by Marlene Corbun. Dorland's practice — painting and installation built from the "aftereffects" of digital systems, interfaces, and data — offers another angle on the same question this series keeps returning to: what does it mean to take digital culture seriously as material, whether you're the one making it or the one collecting it?

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Catch up on the full summer series about digital art in 4 perspectives:

Part 1: The Curator's Perspectice

Part 2: The Artist's Perspective

Part 3: The Builder's Perspective

Part 4: The Collector's Perspective [coming out August 24]

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